


Mortality

by Augustus



Category: Dragonlance - Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2001-10-16
Updated: 2001-10-16
Packaged: 2018-03-08 18:12:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3218573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Augustus/pseuds/Augustus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kitiara disposes of her past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mortality

**Author's Note:**

> Chronology: Set during the War of the Lance. I haven’t yet read the Second Generation (meh, the Mary Sueism of ‘Raistlin’s Daughter’ has really put me off it) so this is probably in complete conflict with the canon. Oops.

There was something satisfying in his pain, something rewarding in the way his face twisted grotesquely with an almost careless thrust of the spear. There may have been honour in the way he took the blow, but foolish rules and a good heart were no armour worthy of deflecting his own mortality. The picture of him crumpling stiffly into the snow shone bright within her mind, shimmering hazily like the surface stones of a path in the midday sun. Sometimes Kitiara found herself wishing that she had been closer, near enough to capture the look in his eyes for the sake of her memories. On other occasions there was almost an inadmissible gladness that her wishes had not been granted. Such moments were rare, fleeting lulls in the whirl of battles and hatred and the exhilaration of power, but their darkness was stifling, the eerie blue-black of broad holes in the sky where once stars had shone. Those were the times when childhood memories cast misleading shadows on the cool steel of her emotion, binding and blinding, sending blood rushing hot through veins long ago turned to ice.

Sturm had recognised her; she knew it to be so. There had been no time for polite reunions or stilted reminiscences, just the sun-gilded flash of metal and the scarlet droplets that dappled dirty white snow into a multicoloured galaxy of death. It was not so much the recognition that haunted her as the admonition in his stance, the moralistic disappointment so familiar to her eyes. And although he might have grasped his honour with a strength greater than her own, the battle had been hers. She had been the victor, flying swift through hazy sky as the horizon reddened with the rising of the sun, power clasped within hands rendered ruddy by the wind. He won only the icy recognition of mortality and the flicker-dance of flames on a lonely funeral pyre.

(but once)

Childish swordplay in the soft tickle of springtime grass, tumbles taken without true resentment, eyes shielded from the sunlight and the gentle rhythm of blade upon blade. Whispers cloaked in innocence became words with double meaning. Comradeship, friendship, her guard had been broken, shattered, her armour rendered useless by the weight of his trust. And it had almost felt... good. Laughter pushed aside the ice, claiming her, tempting her with another life and another path and another destiny. For a moment, for several, soft-spoken logic and the earnest gaze of steady brown eyes had taken her resolve and bent it beneath the heady weight of unfamiliar emotion.

There were others before, others since, but there was something in that intertwining of darkness and light that clung to Kitiara's memory, resisting every attempt to cast it far from her thoughts, from her soul. Burning, the past stayed forever with her, _he_ stayed forever with her. And no distance could ever be enough, because even the thought of him was a failure, because even a whispered name on the edge of a dream was enough to fill her with self-loathing. It wasn't control, it wasn't strength, it was the foolish reminiscence of one who had thought she might know better. Instead there had been the distant glint of sunlight and a time-faded echo of laughter and whispered dreams.

(no more)

She had told Laurana that she hadn't known. Not in time to stop, not in time for some reversal of actions, of morality. A lie wasn't much when the blood of the past stained the steel of her weapon with an accusing crimson scar. It wasn't much at all when she was face to face with a misguided rival, wondering why it was that she couldn't think to feel disdain, couldn't feel to think of anything beyond the crumpled body at her feet. Better not to think at all. Thoughts were weakness, wrapped in the shimmering fallacies of foolish reminiscence. Easy to see. Easy now.

And if it had taken death to comprehend strength, then Kitiara was not one to mask the victory with an apparition of regret. _She_ was alive, and in the end that was all that mattered, the satiating thrill of the endless duel with mortality. Not blood on snow, not reproach, just an eternal movement onwards, forwards, straight to whatever destiny held her fancy most that day. And if weakness had made her feel, made her care, made her remember, then that fragility could be forgotten in the clash of steel on steel, buried within the arms of the latest willing paramour, drowned in the knowledge that the darkness of her armour could no longer be pierced. She had ensured that, purchased it with the blade and the vestiges of her soul. No going back. No regrets. No sense in dreaming of the sunlight when she'd embraced the chill of darkness so very long ago.

(the shattered sun)

And if Kitiara still remembered, if her dreams still brought his name to her lips, then that was no admission of guilt, of error, of mortality. Just a blood-tinged memory, the death throes of the past.

**16-10-2001**


End file.
